Halfway Around the World

I feel like we all have someone who we would go halfway around the world for.

Don’t we?

My first someone I met when I was a sweet, innocent lass of sixteen. Never mind he was a manipulative predator. When I loved him, I loved him hard. Now I look back and think, ‘God, what was I thinking?’

I knew I could never have him forever. He was older, he came from a background of drugs and alcoholism and abuse. He was also unstable and a psychopath. He once said to me, ‘One day you’ll be married to a nice man who is just like you, and I will be languishing by the road somewhere, or dead, probably.’

I refused to believe that, at the time.

I was vehemently, irrevocably infatuated by him.

“No way,” I told him passionately, “I will be married to him, yes, but I will still be in love with you. I will always think about you, I will always want to be with you.”

I believed that so strongly.

Yesterday I was watching my husband as he put his shirt on for work. I watched how his brows furrowed in deep thought (they always are, he is going to have permanent frown lines), how his lower lip stuck out a little as it does when the cogs of his engineering brain are whirring. I even cast my eye up and down his physique because, well, he’s my husband, I’m allowed.

And my sixteen year old words echoed in my head as I did.

‘I will always think about you’

‘I will still be in love with you when I am married to him’

I didn’t know I would be married to D, though. I am not still in love with that animal of my past. I thought, at the time, since he was my ‘first love’, that I could never experience an attraction and connection this powerful.

They say you never get over your first love. They say your first love is always the strongest.

It wasn’t in my case. I thought it would be, because it shook my entire world, at the time, but the connection I feel with D is ten times more powerful. I love him more as each day passes. Sometimes, yes, I am irritated by him and we fall out, but that’s what any couple does. I can open up to him in a way I could never do with that predator. I never talked when I was with that predator. Only sometimes, but I never spoke about myself and my thoughts and my dreams and aspirations. But with D I am free as a bird. Maybe D is my real first love?

And yes, not a day passes when I don’t think about my ‘first love’, but it’s mostly horrified thoughts and thoughts of disgust, hatred and regret.

I hate him. I really do hope he is dead or languishing by the road somewhere, for what he did to me. Have I healed, yet? No. I know I haven’t. Sometimes my world constricts and gets darker and I am afraid and depressed and I know it’s him, lurking in some dark place in my mind, his terrorising threats echoing in my mind. When an unknown number calls me I still tremble like a leaf, even though I have changed my number several times. But I struggle out of it. It’s not fair to D, it’s not fair to me. Why should I stop living a happy, bright life because of some selfish maniac?

He wasn’t my first love, I realise that now. If he was, I wouldn’t have been able to drop him as quickly as I did when it got too much, and feel nothing, only relief.

Maybe I did love him a little, but I was young and it was probably just naive lust.

My point is, we all have somebody we would travel halfway around the world for. Maybe that somebody isn’t a lover, but a friend. Maybe a family member. I know I would travel seven seas on a rickety ship for my husband.

Who would you travel halfway around the world for?